A letter from my grandfather dated December 1942
And so was it that additional boxes filled with clues from the past began to appear—usually unannounced and unexpected, and always as if by magic.
With the help of Magda, who scoured public records, I found out that my great-uncle Victor had left Prague for America in 1919. For reasons unknown, there, he had changed his last name slightly by dropping the last n. I traced his grandchildren to California. After scrolling through phone books online and leaving messages on a dozen answering machines, I located his grandson, also Victor, the first of many long-lost cousins, in San Diego.
Victor Neuman is an American engineer who was wholly unaware of his Jewish heritage. After our initial Skype call, what struck me was that we had spoken for over an hour, and somehow the conversation had flowed easily. This was in spite of many apparent differences between us. Victor is a few decades older than I am and grew up in California. He received a master’s degree in engineering from Cambridge and is a practicing Methodist, while I was raised in Venezuela, studied humanities, and have no formal religious leanings at all. We had never spoken before, and yet we laughed at the same things with an unexpected familiarity. During our call, Victor mentioned that he had lost touch with another California cousin, Greg, who was involved in real estate and might have more information on the family. But Victor did not have any further details and could not help me find Greg. I played with the spelling, googled every real estate agent named Greg Neumann on the West Coast of the U.S., and even stalked a real estate agent called Gregg Neuman on Facebook. That Gregg finally answered numerous messages and calls with a very polite, if slightly alarmed, email. He clarified that he had initially thought I might be part of a scam, and while he would love to help, his family had been in America for generations, and his background was not Czech but Hungarian. Eventually, the California White Pages yielded some possible phone numbers. I left a few messages on answering machines, and the correct Greg replied with a joyous email. I had found another cousin. On Skype once more, I tried to explain our very large family tree, told him how to get in touch with his cousin Victor—who, it transpired, lived close to him—and explained about my father’s box of papers.
To my astonishment, Greg told me that his own father had also left a box behind. He believed it was still in his attic and contained some old postcards written in German and Czech. As a boy in California, his father, Harry Neuman, had been a keen philatelist who kept the letters simply for the collectible stamps on the envelopes. A few days later, Greg graciously posted this box of his father’s stamps to me. Carefully packaged with layered cardboard and secured all around with strong-bonding brown tape, it was filled with postcards, envelopes containing letters, and photographs sent in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s from my grandparents and the family in Europe to their relatives in the U.S.
I opened the box and, for a moment, understood what people mean when they say things are fated. Greg had not known whom these cards were from. He had never seen our family tree. I turned around the first postcard at the very top of the pile that he had sent, one with a French stamp dated 1936. I immediately recognized my grandfather in a bathing suit, nonchalantly sitting on a beach, smiling. It was an instant of inexplicable concordance, one of many that drove me on with the research, echoing the luminosity and magical realism of Latin America more than the darkness of Europe during World War II.
Items from Greg’s box included a postcard photograph of Otto on the beach in Cannes in 1936
In a similar manner, I traced and spoke to a dozen other people. I located cousins in California, Paris, Leeds in England, Bern in Switzerland, Prague, and the Czech town of Teplice. I discovered connected friends in Florida, New York, Australia, Indonesia, and the Czech village of Staré Město. I have collected memories and evidence from every reliable source I could find. Each unhesitatingly opened and shared troves of family documents, photographs, written memoirs, saved notebooks, and childhood tales to help me piece together the puzzle of my father’s family and what happened to them during the war.
I have now listened to and read so many stories from people who knew my family in the 1930s and ’40s, and read enough of their written words, to be able to sense the personalities of those who have gone, to hear their voices, to glimpse the people they were. I have gone to the paint factory that the family owned, to the houses and apartments that were once theirs. I have paced the same rooms and hallways, climbed the same stairs, held on to the same railings, crossed the same streets, tripped on the same chipped cobblestones of Prague sidewalks, walked on the paths of the Vltava that smell of the same magnolias and geraniums, knocked on the same doors, turned the same handles, and entered the same rooms. From their windows, I have looked out at their world. I have imagined them so many times that it is almost as if I have my own memory of my grandparents and of who and how they were.
Perhaps all remembrance is a process of compilation and creation. Every day we absorb what is around us and assemble observations of a specific time: sounds, smells, textures, words, images, and feelings. Of course, we prioritize and edit as we go, subjective witnesses to our own lives, providing recollections that are often biased and incomplete. It is, I suppose, why even honest and reliable witnesses in a courtroom can describe the same event differently. And yet I am told that they tend to agree on the essentials even while the details can vary wildly. As a number of witnesses provide their diverse accounts, a distinctive picture frequently emerges—even if it is a mosaic of impressions rather than a series of identical overlapping images.
I realize now that I too have created a mosaic of assembled reminiscences. It is a remembrance because the words, the feelings, the impact left on others mean that those who shaped them are still present, retained as a mental perception. I have collated these recollections that capture my grandparents’ essence and consolidated them with the photographs and the hundreds of documents. Now my family are no longer a passed-over palette of faded shadows.
I can conjure them.
I can see them vividly.
Hans with his uncle Richard, Otto, and Ella Neumann in Prague, c. 1934
CHAPTER 2 The Watch on the Plate
The first time I saw a photograph of my father as a child, he had been dead for over fifteen years. Halfway into my research, my uncle Lotar’s daughter, my cousin Madla, brought me an album from her father’s house. She had forgotten about its existence, though, as a small girl, she had been shown the contents. It is covered in black vinyl and, despite its obvious age, is in perfect condition. An adhesive black label reads Famille Lotar in lettering of white relief. Its cardboard pages are laden with black-and-white photographs, some with corners curling as they have become unglued. As I turned the pages carefully, trying to recognize my family, the tiny image of a boy jumped out at me. It startled me because the face was so familiar. It does not immediately remind me of my father, it just looks like my son. The way my eldest holds his hands is the same. Their noses are different, the shade of the hair is dissimilar, but the eyes are uncannily identical. I have seen that expression, that half grin, the eyes gazing up, a million times. In the photograph, the family is in the woods near their holiday house in Libčice just outside of Prague. My grandparents Ella and Otto, and Otto’s youngest brother, Richard, pose for the camera while two smiling boys sit on picnic blankets in the foreground. They are my uncle Lotar and my father, Hans. It must have been taken in 1928 or 1929. Lotar appears to be about ten, and Hans could not be more than seven or eight. The boys are dressed in pin-striped jackets and shorts, and their hair is styled in matching pudding-bowl cuts. When I look closely, despite the blur of time passed, I recognize my father’s smile. There is a distinct impishness in his eyes.